NB: This is mostly about Black Sails, rather than the book itself.

I read this to be a better-informed viewer of Black Sails, so already the book was a little bit at an unfair disadvantage. So many of the characterizations are already wildly misaligned from what they are in the show, that the book--despite being the OG text--felt wrong. To be sure, the show does make quite a song and dance about constructing an image of oneself to be feared, and quite a bit can happen in 20 years, so there's room for the characters to shift and leave stories behind that match what we get in this book, but still. Poor Billy, especially, turning into the old drunkard who dies so miserably in the first chapters. I do, however, absolutely believe that Silver ends up as we see him here: sly, manipulative, turncoating, and teaming up with Max (??). I don't see them actually living as husband and wife, however they present their relationship to the rest of the world, but I absolutely see them working together very effectively. As, after all, they've done before.

What I'm most fascinated by are the hints about how the show is going to end with the relationships between our main characters. Flint, who died (they say) as a raving drunk in Savannah, I may or may not believe. It's only what people say they saw, so what actually happened could be anything. I fully believe he's capable of killing six men while he goes to bury his treasure, not to keep the secret, but for some other reason. Not fully sure I believe him using one of the corpses as a pointer. That's a bit too cute for Flint. I'm fascinated by the claims in the book that that Billy ends up terrified of Silver, and Silver is the only man that Flint ever feared. (Billy and Flint's relationship is never fully explored.) I can see the relationship between Silver and Flint turning into the kind of antagonism that might end up where we find it in the book, but given that, at the end of S3 at least, Billy and Silver and very well aligned, I have more difficulty seeing how Billy woudl end up terrified of him. And, to be honest, it's rather a disappointment to see that, after the events of Black Sails, they end up back in England. Clearly--clearly--their lives are in Nassau.

Anyway, I'm glad I have this book in my head as I embark on the last season of Black Sails, but it's not a terribly good book.